This might be an intended restriction, but then it should be checked by model validation. When it strikes, it's rather surprising because you don't see any connection to the attribute name in the backtrace. And it's probably a common thing to name the self relationship after the table.

Anyway, ticket #1826 demonstrates that *any* field that has the same name as the attribute is sufficient to trigger this bug when there's a ForeignKey('self') *anywhere* in the model. It needn't be the ForeignKey field itself.

(In [4673]) 0.91-bugfixes: Fixed #999 by resolving name clash in the metasystem which could confuse manipulators about which fields they should follow. Refs #1808, #1826, #1839 and #2415, which are variations of this that persist in trunk.

(In [4676]) Fixed #1839, #2415, #2536 -- Fixed a generated name clash that was common in
self-referential and circular relations. A lot of community debugging went into
this fix, so thanks to bmurdock@…, Marek Kubica, ramiro, Michael
Radziej (the last two giving test cases showing the problem) and James Bennett
(who did the hard work to actually diagnose the true problem and fix it).